Friday, 4 December 2015

Old Mac Mini runs old OpenSSH with broken cipher set

I couldn't find much about this on the interwebs but I happen to know an OpenSSH developer so I went straight to the experts here.

Basically, if you run OpenSSH on a mac mini, you shouldn't trust Apple to give you updates and you're implementation may well be full of holes. The latest OpenSSH version is 7.1 and my 2009 mac mini with all the updates was reporting

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_5.5p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8n 24 Mar 2010

Wow... That's not good.

If you MUST run with this version and you want to be security conscious (and NSA paranoid) so you've restricted your allowed cipher list on your client machines, note that aes128-gcm is advertised by this broken Apple build but not actually supported by the binary. This will look like an immediate disconnection after connecting. You have this problem if your system.log contains: